Give!Guide Final Report

Thank you, readers!

And the winners from our third annual holiday fundraiser for local nonprofits are...

For most donations from WW readers age 35 and under: The Bus Project (First Place), Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette (Second), Schoolhouse Supplies (Third), and Growing Gardens (Honorable Mention).

For largest total: Habitat for Humanity (First), Planned Parenthood of the Columbia/Willamette (Second), disjecta (Third), and Sisters of the Road (Honorable Mention).

First-place winners receive $1,000 matching grants; second place, $500; and third place, $250. Since Planned Parenthood placed in two categories and no one is allowed to win more than one prize, disjecta gets moved up from third to second in total donations. Growing Gardens and Sisters of the Road each will receive third-place awards.

Congratulations to our winners—and great thanks to our incredibly generous readers. In its third year, WW's Give!Guide raised nearly a quarter of a million dollars for local nonprofits and five worthy folks who work for them.

The guide's twin goals are to make year-end giving easy and to hook younger Portlanders on the giving habit. Altogether, some 1,400 of you gave more than $220,000 through the Give!Guide website. Another $3,791.96 came in checks. Willamette Week threw in $3,950 in matching dollars. And the Skidmore Prizes amounted to $20,000—for a grand total of $248,397.01.

Yet the total dollar amount tells only part of the story. While checking in with groups whose numbers were low, I learned how much giving goes on outside the website.

The Deep Roots Music Project, for example, ended up near the bottom of the list when it came to total dollars received.

But Chris Gragg, the organization's founder, told me what the website didn't capture: hundreds of dollars in corporate matches for the gifts that came in through the Give!Guide process. Moreover, Gragg noted, all donors were new to his organization this year, so Give!Guide added fresh contributors to his existing support system.

Another seeming low performer was the Portland Animal Welfare Team. When I called Wendy Kohn in mid-December, she told me the PAW Team had received "a huge pile of non-monetary donations"—veterinary medical supplies, a "station wagon-load of stuff" and dozens of new volunteers.

Not to be forgotten in this process are a number of wonderful helpers, without whose generous support Give!Guide could not succeed: Momentum Market Intelligence, OakTree Digital, E&R Wine Shop, Stumptown Coffee, Clear Creek Distillery, and Rogue Ales.